1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to transportation conveyors of articles such as cartons and totes, and is particularly related to descrambling or unscrambling conveyors that cause articles to singulate during continuous operation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Descrambling or unscrambling conveyors have been used in material handling of containers such as cartons in order to singulate the cartons for accumulation, merging, sorting, etc. For example, U.S. Publ. No. 20070221475 A1, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety, discloses an unscrambling conveyor having three lanes with the rollers of the outer lanes skewed toward the middle lane. The middle lane runs at a different speed than the outer lanes, and may have skewed rollers. The unscrambling conveyor may include several modules sequentially arranged, with a speed change within the lanes between the modules. The outer lanes are skewed to draw cartons into a faster running center lane to sequence cartons out in single file. However, two identical side-by-side cartons that straddle the center lane can be maintained in this arrangement without separating.
More recently in U.S. Pat. No. 9,315,341, issuing 19 Apr. 2016, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporation in its entirety, a merging conveyor system has a plurality of infeed staging conveyors configured to selectively feed batches of article arranged in a side by side configuration to a downstream merging conveyor. The merging conveyor is configured to merge batches of articles arranged in a side-by-side configuration and to singulate the individual articles of each batch while merging the batches as the articles are singulated while being advanced downstream as a flow of in-line separated articles. The merging conveyor includes a plurality of laterally spaced lanes of conveying surfaces which having a respective speed and each imparting an inward lateral force on the articles. A descrambling conveyor is disposed downstream of the merging conveyor.
While the disclosed conveyor system is effective for singulating three side-by-side cartons, it would be desirable to have a descrambling apparatus that could singulate side-by-side cartons in a much shorter configuration. A shorter apparatus would generally correlate to a much more economical solution, requiring less equipment and less floor space.